One of the most exciting things about working on the news staff of the Spectator—and I say this as a campus wonk myself—is getting the chance to cover the wide world of New York City. There is no more interesting place in the world to follow the melodrama of local politics or pound the pavement in search of an interesting city feature. But there is also no media market more oversaturated than New York, so I thought it would be a good idea to break down what we see as our niche within the Big Apple.

But first, a quick primer on the structure of the news section. There are two news editors, one whose primary focus is campus news (this year, that would be me) and one who concentrates on city news (this year, Melissa Repko). Each of us also has two or three deputy news editors who focus on specific sectors of coverage within each of our spheres. But while our focuses may be separate, the city and campus news staffs are hardly independent of each other as we share a staff of writers and collaborate nightly in the production of the paper.

One question which we get a lot at is: why should a student newspaper cover the city at all? Here’s where I think the Spec reflects the unique character of Columbia, where so much of student and campus life is tied to New York, from the subway that runs right to the doorstep of the dorms to the complex zoning maneuvering inherent in any new construction by Columbia. It should also be noted that off-campus coverage is hardly unprecedented among student newspapers. While some—an example is NYU’s Washington Square News—restrict themselves almost exclusively to campus news, in my hometown of Berkeley, Ca., the Daily Californian is the only daily paper. We believe that we serve a similar role as the paper of record not only for Columbia University but also for Morningside Heights and West Harlem.

I’d also like to add as the campus—not city—news editor that I believe that the city news section adds a tremendous amount of value to our campus coverage by contextualizing every action that Columbia takes within the wider world rather than just the insular university community. A perfect example is our coverage of the Manhattanville expansion which could simply be a story about space concerns on campus but has brought to life with complimentary coverage from our city colleagues about the impact of a transformation on the West Harlem community.

We consider the Spec to be first and foremost a campus and community newspaper. Thus, the breadth of our city reporting is strongly defined by our geographic coverage area, which is a rectangle contained by 96^th St. to the south, Central Park and Frederick Douglas Blvd. to the east, 135^th St. to the north, and the Hudson River to west. Our focus is on the stories and people within that area, which contains almost all of our newsstands and the entirety of Columbia and Barnard’s Morningside Campus as well as the neighborhoods of Morningside Heights and West Harlem. This line is not hard-and-fast—we will occasionally venture out of our coverage area for a particularly relevant or interesting story (and, a major caveat, campus-side coverage often takes us up to the Medical Center campus at 168^th St., the Columbia Club at 42^nd St., or any number of other city locations). But wherever our reporting takes us, it always has to come back with relevance and importance to our home base.

Here are a couple of examples from this year of that principle in action. When we first heard last Tuesday evening that a building collapse in East Harlem had impeded Metro North train service, our first impulse was to send our transit beat chief to the 125^th St. station to cover it. But since the calamity was several blocks east of our normal coverage and didn’t necessarily directly impact Columbia, we passed on it. On the other hand, when last year the city took a look at rezoning the entirety of 125^th St. from the Harlem River to the East River, our coverage looked beyond our coverage area to place the portions of West Harlem that would be redeveloped in the context of the greater city.

No one at the Spec is under the impression that we’re necessarily the paper of record for New York as a whole, but we do think that we’ve carved out a niche for ourselves covering our own corner of Manhattan.

Have you noticed any gaps in our coverage lately? Yes, it happens even here in the Spec news department (hard as it may be for you to believe) and we want your help in figuring out our weaknesses.

Easily the most difficult task in running any all-volunteer organization is keeping together a staff each semester. This is all the more the case at a student org like the Spec, which has a daily product to put out each and every day. Every September, we receive a training class for of eager freshmen, many of whom over the course of the year satisfy their curiosity about journalism and understandably gravitate to other interests. Unfortunately, we have nothing to offer recruits except the thrill of seeing their name in print and a steady supply of V&T’s pizza. By the spring semester, we’re left with a hardcore crew of new Speccies who love journalism enough, or perhaps are simply masochistic enough, to put up with late nights, a brutal production cycle, and the admittedly tempestuous nature of (at least one of) the news editors.

This flux over the course of the year has tremendous ramifications for the way we cover the news. While we wish every former newsie well on their Spec-less explorations of Columbia, we lament the knowledge that we lose each time we lose a writer or former editor, as well as the imbalance in our content that each gap leaves.

These gaps are more apparent at the beginning of the spring than any other time of year as the new news editors adjust to their new positions. To take one funny example, if you feel like you’ve been reading a lot about subways in the Spec lately, you’re right. It just turns out that one of our most productive rising star first year this year is new associate news editor Maggie Astor, our transit beat chief (meaning that’s her primary area of coverage), and she’s taken the beat position as a mandate to go nuts (if you still haven’t watched her multimedia project about riding all of New York’s subway lines in one day, look for it in our multimedia section now). Another of our tremendous new associates, Alix Pianin, has been closely covering a school, General Studies, which often in the past has fallen through the cracks of our coverage.

There is a darker underbelly to this phenomenon, which is that we lose the knowledge of those writers who we don’t retain. Our prolific SEAS beat chief stepped down at the beginning of the semester to focus on academics (boo!), leaving a noticeable void in our coverage of an important undergraduate college. In the ideal world, we’d also have a much bigger staff to keep us connected with both faculty members and student groups than we have so far this year. In the absence of staffers to fill those niches, the rest of our coverage also suffers as our writers and deputy editors take time and energy away from their regular pursuits to compensate.

Just to be clear, not all of these imbalances are inherently bad, especially when our prolific transit beat chief can make something interesting out of what could be a dry beat. However, problems emerge when we start to miss out on important stories simply because of insufficient staffing. Thus, as the novelty of our not-so-new jobs wears off, a major priority of those of us in the news section will be to evaluate and address the gaps in our coverage before we miss something too big.

Here’s where you–the loyal reader–can help us out. Have you noticed anything that we’ve covered insufficiently so far this year? Missed entirely? Drop me a line at jacob.schneider@columbiaspectator.com or just comment on this post and we’ll take a look.

Even though we report murders, crime, and other tragedies on a daily basis, it’s still a shock to the system when one of our own is involved.

When we at the news desk heard that deputy news editor Dan Amzallag had been hit by a car while en route to cover a murder in Harlem Wednesday evening, we faced three major problems. First and foremost, everyone was deeply concerned about Dan who is, as my co-news editor put it in today’s paper, “a good reporter and a better friend.” Second, Dan had been scheduled to write three articles for Thursday’s paper that would either have to be given to other writers or otherwise replaced. Third, we had to decide whether or not to cover the accident itself.

Since we found out so quickly that Dan had been injured, editor in chief Tom Faure was able to get to the St. Luke’s ER before even Dan’s parents and confirm that, though banged up, Dan was going to be okay, which was a major relief to all of us in the office. A steady stream of concerned Speccies passed through the emergency room to check on Dan’s condition throughout the evening.

The city news staff stepped up valiantly to fill in the holes in Wednesday nights reporting left by Dan’s absence—most notably Alix Pianin who, though upset about Dan’s accident and facing a midterm Thursday, took over the reporting on a recent murder in Harlem.

We had the most trouble deciding whether or not Dan’s accident merited an article. When stories crop up that directly involve Spectator or any of our staffers, the decisions are inherently more complicated because it’s hard to know how objective our sense of the story’s importance is and whether or not we can fairly report it. In addition, since we all consider Dan a good friend, we were uncomfortable invading Dan and his family’s privacy by digging for facts at a scary moment.

But what we ultimately realized was that if any other Columbia student had been hit by a car, we would have had no qualms about covering the story in a second (to confirm this, I actually looked through our bound volume archives and found a precedent from a recent semester). So we put together a brief for Thursday’s paper about the accident, treating the story as we would if anyone else had been involved. I would hope that Dan - our crime beat reporter - of all people understands the rationale.

I don’t think that it’s such a bad thing that we felt so conflicted about this article and had to go through the process of soul-searching that covering it entailed. While it is of course a tragedy when anyone is injured in such an accident, and it is especially painful when he’s a member of the Spec family, it’s good for us to sometimes get a reality check about the things that we cover without thought on a daily basis. It’s easy to intellectualize away concerns about the sensitivity of the situation when we’re covering an incident across Harlem, but it’s important for us to keep in mind that all accident victims come with the same family and emotional complications as Dan does.

I think that we made the right decision in this case, and of course we’ll continue to cover tragedies as they occur in the Columbia and West Harlem community, but I hope that we can look back on this week as a growing experience, using our fraught emotions about Dan’s situation to renew our efforts to report with respect for the humanity of everyone we cover.